UHD + HDR + WGC = IBC

This year’s IBC suite of conference sessions has more than a sprinkling of panels wholly devoted to ‘next generation’ Ultra HDTV and the benefits that will flow from High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Colour Gamut (WCG) technologies. Hollywood’s film and TV production studios are now employing HDR in their output, and there have been plenty of test-transmissions in the past few months of HDR-enabled material.

Dr. Dietrich Westerkamp is an extremely well-regarded face at IBC, and will chair this session (9 September, 10:00, Emerald Room). Emmy Award-winning Westerkamp has a lifetime’s experience in TV not least with his 30-years at Thomson/Technicolor, and is still busy on various standards bodies. He is now MD at Hanover-based media and entertainment consultancy WeConsult.

Dr. Westerkamp says HDR and WCG are both exciting developments which will have far-reaching implications for production practice, delivery chains and domestic viewing. Their imagery matches human vision more closely, producing a startlingly life-like rendition. HDR is also a powerful tool for enhancing flexibility in news gathering and creativity in post production.

In this exciting session, the world’s leading contributors to HDR technology (including experts from Dolby, Technicolor including a joint paper with Philips, and Lucien Lenzen from the German Hochschule Rhein-Main) will reveal the results of tests which have measured the subjective reality of HDR images. They will look at conversion between conventional and HDR-WCG formats, HDR for legacy displays and will propose how HDR signals can be conveyed through HEVC compression systems.